Monday, February 19, 2007

West Coast Noodling

Margaret and I finished up our west coast Portastatic swing last night in Los Angeles at the lovely art deco palace the El Rey Theater -- i think it's been gussied up since Superchunk last played there. Nice crowd, Camera Obscura was great and i've got their songs running thorugh my head as usual today. Annie Hayden brought her magic to a couple songs which was great, and Lee from Camera Obscura tore it up on the cabasa (sp?) in fine style. After the show hit the Sanamluang Cafe for some great Thai noodles, thanks to Marc for the recommendation. The night before in SF was an even better show on our end i think, prodded on by a couple of raving lunatics (in a good way) in the front row, who also joined us onstage for some percussion action.

2 Comments:

Have you seen this post about Arcade Fire show tickets by Matt Yglesias? It struck me that maybe you could answer his question:

"I woke up earliesh this morning to buy tickets to the upcoming Arcade Fire show as soon as they went on sale, as did most of my friends. As it turns out, I succeeded in this endeavor. Most people I know who tried this, however, actually failed as demand was just that high.

Which once again raises the question nobody wants to ask: Why aren't tickets for popular rock shows more expensive? Not that these were cheap. They listed at $30 but once all the fees were included, it came out to $43.60 for mine. Still, even at that price, the whole show sold out literally within minutes. And that was totally predictable -- there's a reason we were all ready to click at exactly 10:01 AM on Saturday morning. Why not charge $75 a ticket? It's hard for me to think of any other area of the economy where businesses seem to leave this much money on the table. I guess I'm glad they do it this way (though I imagine some of the people who couldn't get tickets at $43.60 would've been glad to pay $50 to go to the show) but it seems odd."